I find, in my experience, that you only have to think “oh, this will be finished soon” for an entire project to suddenly go ankle over elbow.  A more assured curse is the “I’ll be able to wear this on….”

I made the mistake of thinking BOTH these exact thoughts last Thursday as I completed the last round of the cuff of my ICE shrug – just the (ok, uber long but crochet) middle edging to do, two and a half hours commute craft time, plus a long drive on Sunday morning (with me being passenger) so I’d be able to block Sunday evening and wear this on Wednesday!

At which point a small wormhole opened and sucked that reality into an alternate dimension.

“Trying it on” for the benefit of some work colleagues for who a shrug is a new and novel concept (let alone making one) I decided that the sleeves were a bit short.  The edge of the cuff sat on my elbows, so the bottom edge sat half way down my forearm.  It just looked small.

I had got gauge on my knitting (if anything a little loose!) and I had done the right number of rows.

No problem, I’ll just take out the second cuff, undo the bind off, pick up the stitches and knit another 6” onto the body.  Fine.  It won’t add that long to the job.  I’ll still be finished for Friday.

Ha!

I unravelled and unpicked and picked and knit.  4” in I had a look and realised that somehow my tension had become more relaxed.  MUCH more relaxed.  Suddenly I had a piece of knitting with something approaching a fishing net attached to one end.  This thing suddenly looked like I had handed it to my 3 year old niece for knitting practice.

That’s ok, I thought I can just work the extra yarn out of each stitch and feed it up though the knitting row by row until it comes out at the top.

Those of you who are “good” knitters will know what a stupid idea that was.

20 minutes and 1 row later I had an extra 18 inches of yarn sticking out one side of my project (see told you my gauge had got really loose) and I had come to a rather interesting conclusion.  It was going to be faster to rip it out and re-knit that section.

So my commute craft time this morning was spent frogging and picking up stitches.  Again.  I have six inches of knitting to do, then the cuff and then the middle edging.  Not going to be done by Friday.